School Notes: School of Management
November/December 2010

Alumni named Donaldson Fellows

Four alumni who exemplify the Yale SOM mission of educating leaders for business and society have been named Donaldson Fellows: Bradley Abelow ’89MBA, COO of MF Global Inc.; Jennie Niles ’98MBA, founding principal of E. L. Haynes Public Charter School; Ken Ofori-Atta ’88MBA, executive chair and cofounder of Databank Financial Services, Ltd.; and Hilary Pennington ’83MBA, director of education, postsecondary success, and special initiatives, United States program, for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The four were chosen by a committee of faculty and staff after being nominated by fellow members of the Yale SOM community. The Donaldson Fellows are on campus in early November to participate in a series of panels and discussions open to all current students. The award, established in 2008, is named for SOM founding dean William H. Donaldson. For more information, go to http://mba.yale.edu/alumni/donaldsonfellows.

New fund tracks index inspired by faculty studies

K. Geert Rouwenhorst, deputy dean for curriculum development, professor of finance, and deputy director of the International Center for Finance at Yale SOM, rang the opening bell of the New York Stock Exchange on August 23 in honor of the recent launch of the United States Commodity Index Fund (USCI) on the NYSE Acra exchange. The USCI tracks the performance of the SummerHaven Dynamic Commodity Index, a portfolio of 14 commodity futures selected each month from a pool of 27 eligible commodities. The design of the SummerHaven index was based on two seminal academic studies by Rouwenhorst and Professor Gary Gorton. Their widely cited paper, “Facts and Fantasies about Commodity Futures,” found that commodity futures produce the same returns as equities but with less risk, and offer a diversification benefit because their returns are negatively correlated with those of stocks and bonds. “The Fundamentals of Commodity Futures Returns,” authored with Fumio Hayashi of the University of Tokyo, showed that commodity futures returns vary depending on the physical inventory of the commodity in the economy; returns are greater when low inventories make prices more volatile.

MBA-E student blogs on experience for Bloomberg Businessweek

For the past two years, Linda Craib ’10MBA-E chronicled her experiences as a mid-career health professional working to get her MBA at Yale SOM. Trained as a pediatric critical care nurse, Craib wrote regular columns for the Bloomberg Businessweek website. In her most recent column, she described classes—from Corporate Finance to Macroeconomics to Entrepreneurial Business Planning—in which she developed critical management and leadership skills, which she applied even before graduating by founding a company dedicated to improving diagnostic testing for autism disorders. She expressed gratitude to a number of professors who made extraordinary efforts to help her along the way. Craib concluded: “As a member of the Class of 2010, I graduated with the realization that I had already started living the aspirations I outlined in my admissions essay.” Read the full column at businessweek.com/bschools/content/
jun2010/bs20100610_152843.htm